VB:Tutorials:Rotating A Point In 2D
Tutorial by Nicholas Gorski GMan GMan This tutorial will discuss rotating a point around a point using Sin/Cos. The Math Sine and CoSine What are Sine and Cosine? Sine and Cosine are our little buddies. They like to deal with angles. How do we rotate something with them? First we need a way to store points. Add this to a module: Public Type POINT X As Single Y As Single End Type Public P As POINT Rotating Now we have a point. Useless! We need to rotate it. The math behind rotation (without matrix) is: x' = Cos(Theta) * x - Sin(Theta) * y y' = Sin(Theta) * x + Cos(Theta) * y But remember this magical rule: Visual Basic uses radians! How do we convert degrees to radians? We need a constant PI, which equals Atn(1) * 4 which equals 3.14159265358979. Add that to the module. Now add this nifty little function: Public Function D2R(ByVal Angle As Single) As Single D2R = Angle / 180 * PI End Function Plug in Angle degrees and you get radians. Now we can add our formulas together (above) and get this: Public Function RotatePoint(ByRef pPoint As POINT, ByVal Degrees As Single) As POINT RotatePoint.X = Cos(D2R(Degrees)) * pPoint.X - Sin(D2R(Degrees)) * pPoint.Y RotatePoint.Y = Sin(D2R(Degrees)) * pPoint.X + Cos(D2R(Degrees)) * pPoint.Y End Function Yeah! That's pretty cool, but also somewhat useless. Why? It always rotates around the origin! However, rotating around any point is easy. Rotating around a point Rotating around an origin is simple. The x/y terms in our Sin/Cos functions need to have the origin subtracted from them, resulting in a vector. The real coordinates may be obtained by adding the vector to the origin. Here is the code: Public Function RotatePoint(ByRef pPoint As POINT, ByRef pOrigin As POINT, _ ByVal Degrees As Single) As POINT RotatePoint.X = pOrigin.X + ( Cos(D2R(Degrees)) * (pPoint.X - pOrigin.X) - _ Sin(D2R(Degrees)) * (pPoint.Y - pOrigin.Y) ) RotatePoint.Y = pOrigin.Y + ( Sin(D2R(Degrees)) * (pPoint.X - pOrigin.X) + _ Cos(D2R(Degrees)) * (pPoint.Y - pOrigin.Y) ) End Function Now your point always rotates around the speicified origin! Optimize This section only applies if you will be constantly rotating points through out your game. By now, you probably know that the Sin and Cosine (and Tan and all other trig functions) are sssslllloooowwww. But how do we make them fast? Is there some other method of calculation? No! Instead we stop calculating at all! How do we do that? We create lookup tables. Add this to your module: Public tSine(3590) As Single Public tCoSine(3590) As Single That's 0 to 359 degrees, plus one decimal place of accuracy. Create a function called LoadTables, and add this: Public Sub LoadTables() Dim i As Long For i = 0 To 3590 tSine(i) = Sin(D2R(i / 10)) tCoSine(i) = Cos(D2R(i / 10)) Next i End Sub This goes through each element in the array, filling in data (in degrees). Now we need functions to get this data. You may be thinking something like this: Public Function Sine(ByVal Angle As Single) As Single Sine = tSine(Angle*10) End Function This would work, but there is one flaw. What happens when the angle is too small or large? The array element won't exist! So we must fix that: Public Function Sine(ByVal Angle As Single) As Single Dim A As Single A = Round(Angle, 1) Do If A > 359 Then A = A - 360 If A < 0 Then A = A + 360 Loop Until (A >= 0) And (A <= 359) Sine = tSine(A * 10) End Function Public Function CoSine(ByVal Angle As Single) As Single Dim A As Single A = Round(Angle, 1) Do If A > 359 Then A = A - 360 If A < 0 Then A = A + 360 Loop Until (A >= 0) And (A <= 359) CoSine = tCoSine(A * 10) End Function There! What this does is round the number to 1 decimal place. Then, it either adds or subtract 360 until the number is within range of the array. If you do not need 1 decimal place of accuracy (which is always good to have), you can simply use the Mod function like so: Public Function Sine(ByVal Angle As Single) As Single Sine = tSine(Angle Mod 360) End Function Public Function CoSine(ByVal Angle As Single) As Single CoSine = tCoSine(Angle Mod 360) End Function Just remember to make the arrays 0 to 359, instead of 0 to 3590. (Along with the initializing code!) Now we must change the RotatePoint function to these changes. Notice how much cleaner it looks (and faster too!): Public Function RotatePoint(ByRef pPoint As POINT, ByRef pOrigin As POINT, _ ByVal Degrees As Single) As POINT RotatePoint.X = pOrigin.X + CoSine(Degrees) * (pPoint.X - pOrigin.X) - Sine(Degrees) * (pPoint.Y - pOrigin.Y) RotatePoint.Y = pOrigin.Y + Sine(Degrees) * (pPoint.X - pOrigin.X) + CoSine(Degrees) * (pPoint.Y - pOrigin.Y) End Function REMEMBER TO CALL THE LoadTable FUNCTION!!! While writing this code I kept thinking I had faulty code. The rotated point was always right on the origin! Then I realised I forgot to load the tables. So don't forget! Done Now you can rotate a point around any point! Here is the source code. Instructions: Right-click to set the origin point. Left-click to set a point. Enter the angle in the dialog that pops up. The point will be rotated around the origin you selected. Category:VB Category:Tutorial See also Rotating A Point In C#